Mini Car, TV, $22 for Sterilization In India

In an effort to control India's growing population, health officials west of New Delhi are offering incentives like TVs, a mini car, and food processors to the first sterilization participants. Others who get vasectomies will receive the American equivalent of $22.80 and around $4.50 for the person who referred them. That similar cash compensation plan is currently offered to poor men of Tagpur.

But this isn't merely compensation for a permanent decision to give up parenthood. It's really more of a sweepstakes with prizes for the lucky ones. Rules are, sterilization participants must enter between now and September 30th to be “entered into a lottery to win prizes.” -Asian Tribune

Incentives for sterilization in India are not new. In 1973, a piece called “Food Incentives For Indians: Can They Be Just?” entertained the idea of offering food for the poor to sterilize. This initiative proposed by the Indian Family Planning Council who held that such restrictions of freedom would benefit the greater good and ensure freedom, nutrition, jobs, and education. This raised the question if the initiative was similar to coercing the poor to choose between no food or no family.

Ethics questions surfaced again during the forced sterilization scandal talked about below.

Apparently the ethical verdict is in, give up future children in India and you could walk away with a car, a food processor, a TV set, 22 bucks…

But to some family planning advocates, “the price is wrong, Bob.” Some call the new rewards-based plan “coercive and unsustainable.”

“We don't favour incentives as a way of encouraging sterilisation, it is coercion by a different name. Besides, how can you sustain it? You can't give a Tata Nano every six months to people,” Sona Sharma from the non-profit Population Foundation of India asked.

Sharma warned against the rush to meet sterilisation targets. “They will probably succeed in raising numbers, but the quality of medical care is always compromised in such situations, when you have many patients, few doctors, and limited time, doctors end up cutting corners and the repercussions can be frightening,” she cautioned. -Asian Tribune

HFA will bring more news soon about the global push for depopulation efforts.

~Health Freedoms

India offers cars and TV sets for sterilisation

Health officials in India are offering attractive incentives including a car, motorcycles and television sets to men and women who volunteer for sterilisation in a bid to control the country's surging population.

Launching the scheme yesterday in Rajasthan's Jhunjunu, 155miles west of New Delhi Sitaram Sharma the desert town's chief medical officer was hopeful that these enticements would tempt at least 30,000 people to undergo sterilisation.

“We are confident that this idea will work well” Mr Sharma said of the three-month long scheme.

The inducements on offer contributed by a local charitable trust include one Nano, the world's cheapest car for the first volunteer, five motorcycles and an equal number of colour televisions and food blenders for disbursal amongst subsequent candidates.

Others would be paid varying cash amounts that would supplement the federal government's Family Welfare scheme which offered Rs1000 (£14.20) to those undergoing vasectomy and Rs200 (2.85 Pounds) to the one who motivated them.

Under a similar incentive scheme launched two years earlier around 150 men had received gun licences in exchange for vasectomies in Central India's bandit-infested Shivpuri region.

India launched its family planning programme in 1952 but the 19-month internal Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s for personal political ends severely jeopardised it through forced sterilisation of thousands of unmarried young men and women and aged people.

Gandhi lost the general elections largely because of the forced vasectomies.

Thereafter, successive federal governments have floundered on ways to control India's population of 1.21 billion that is expected to overtake China's by 2030.

According to provisional figures of the latest census concluded in April India was more populous than Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan and the US put together.

It was home to 17 per cent of the world's population and had added 181 million people to its numbers since the previous headcount a decade ago.

The initial census figures also indicated a worrying decline in the country's child sex ratio, down to 914 females for every 1000 males, the lowest since independence 64 years ago which was causing myriad other social problems.